Now I’m really online

2005-12-15

After the inevitable slight obstacle, I now have my home pc connected. The nokia laptop is totally locked down and hence not much fun (I have admin rights but I’d rather not piss off the sysadmins at Nokia).

Getting internet here is really simple. In NL this is a tedious process involving lots of waiting, making several phone calls to some idiot at a call center and then (fingers crossed) it should work. Here it goes as follows:

  1. go to the welho shop (or try your luck on the phone)
  2. sign contract, pick up motorola wireless router
  3. go home
  4. connect the thing to the cable connection
  5. configure your wireless adapter to use the connection
  6. done!

Of course that’s the theory. In this nice old apartment block I can choose from two connections: a nice little official looking cable connection and a cable coming in at the frontdoor and ending somewhere in my living room. The latter works, the first one doesn’t have any signal. That took a while to figure out. The connection on the wall is dead as a doornail. The loose cable does internet (and lovely finish television), doh!

Also RTFM before enabling WEP encryption. I actually managed to lock myself out of my modem. But that’s what reset buttons are for :-).